I saw in another article that Erhardt had been reportedly died due to a seizure. What happened to him is absolutely horrible. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable about such matters can chime in about whether exhaustion actually might have triggered the cause of death.
What is actually insane is the amount of face time and waste due to process and bureaucracy in that 100+ hours.
I was really shocked when I moved from this to Google where all that mattered was the outcome and I did more work in 50h per week...
People in investment banks waste time on most idiotic things. The most drastic example I remember was importance of order of people in the To field in the email (People had to be ordered by their seniority)
There really should be restrictions on how much an intern can actually work. I know in the US, if you work more than 32 hours a week for a full year, you are considered full time for benefits purposes, but if they work you for slightly less than one year you can work as many hours as you want. I recently got an email from my school advertising an internship at $10 and 50 hours a week, right as the new semester is starting.
It's absolutely insane, and the intern's manager should have stopped him from working so much, even if he was never explicitly required to work that much. During my internship, my manager sent me home even if I wanted to work more.
This internships are only 10-12 weeks long. And you have to sign waiver that you "agree to work more if there are valid business reasons"
As a full time analyst, you work same hours though...
The thing is, everyone who gets to investment banking knows what she signs up for. You are actually asked during interview "how much do you expect to work?"
There are enough documented cases (mostly in Asia) of people dying after multi day long gaming sessions.
Sleep deprivation is considered torture for good reason. You can be sure that it didn't improved his health.
My personal record is diablo 1/heroes 3/bridge mixed session for 120 hours straight - at the end I felt pretty miserable. Throw some genetic weakness into this kind of load and you have potent disaster recipe.
